Reaching for the Fruits of Compassion: Stories and Strategies

We try to remember to put ourselves in others' shoes, but how do we do so and how does doing so affect us?  How are healthcare practitioners affected by such consistent calls to empathy, and how do they provide the compassionate care patients most need?  Can we actively cultivate our capacities both to empathize more intimately with the happiness and suffering of others, and to accept and channel our shared feelings compassionately?  Recent research has shown that compassion training and practice can affect, neurologically and experientially, how we perceive others and ourselves.  Please join us as a 4th year medical student, a cancer physician of palliative care, and a minister and compassion educator share their perspectives and strategies on keeping a compassionate heart, in healthcare and in greater society.

Dinner will be served.

General admission $25 | Students $15

Speakers:

 Reverend Betty Adam, a native Houstonian, has served at Christ Church Cathedral since  1992,  currently as Resident Canon Theologian and Spiritual Director of Brigid’s Place.  Canon  Adam is a graduate of the University of Texas in Austin. She holds an M.A. in English  literature from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. and PhD in philosophy  from Rice University. Formerly assistant professor in the philosophy department at the  University of St. Thomas and lay chaplain at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, she was  ordained priest in 1991 after completing her Masters of Divinity at the Houston Graduate  School of Theology. In 1995, she was a recipient of a Merrill Fellowship and attended the Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, MA. Canon Adam is married to William Kendall Adam. They have two grown sons, Mark and Michael.

 Dr. Marvin Delgado-Guay was born in Guatemala and completed his Medical School at  Universidad  Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala City. He went on to Internal Medicine  training at Michael  Reese Hospital, before going on to complete a fellowship in Geriatrics  Medicine at Harvard.    He finished clinical and research fellowships in Palliative care at The  University of Texas  M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where he now serves as associate  professor, coordinating  Palliative Care services and participating in Geriatrics Services. His  main interests involve  education processes in palliative care, and he has published  numerous research papers on  the physical, psychosocial and spiritual ailments of advanced  cancer patients.

 Rachel Conrad is a fourth-year medical student at Baylor College of Medicine who is  currently applying to residency in psychiatry. Prior to medical school, she studied Health &  Societies at University of Pennsylvania and worked as an Associate Consultant at Bain &  Co. She completed a 500-hour yoga instructor training program through Sunstone Yoga  and has sat three 10-day Vipassana meditation courses. Her writing has been published in  The Intima: Journal of Narrative Medicine, and she contributes to numerous blogs.

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